After nearly 26 years, “Chelsea Jane Doe” was finally identified by her name this summer: Tiffany Bradley. The breakthrough closed a decades long search, bringing a long-awaited resolution to a mystery that had languished unsolved.
The case was cracked using investigative genetic genealogy, a combination of DNA analysis and paper trail research that has been used over the past decade to reverse engineer a person’s identity. While the technique has typically been used to search for suspects, the same method is providing a voice to the hundreds of unnamed Jane and John Does nationwide like Bradley.
“The fact that we are here today is a miracle,” Bradley’s niece Shakirah Wiggins said. “It is totally amazing that after 26 years, people care enough to give her a name and return her to her family.”
Bradley, 16, was a joyful child with a radiant smile, her family said. She vanished in November 2000, the FBI said. Meanwhile, for decades in Chelsea, Massachusetts, roughly 300 miles away, investigators had only grim fragments of a case — the mutilated remains of a teenage girl discovered in a parking lot, just across the river from Boston, and a killer who admitted to strangling and dismembering her. The culprit was behind bars, but the victim’s identity remained out of reach, according to Chelsea police.
The first clue in the case came decades later. Three years ago, a private forensic science company called Othram built a DNA profile for the murdered girl, but because of the condition her body parts were discovered in, the DNA was in “horrible condition,” David Mittelman, Othram founder and CEO, said.
In a missing persons case, the first step is to identify viable DNA. Without that vital information, the case can’t be worked.
Investigators combed through the DNA and paper trail genealogy research to fill gaps in Bradley’s family tree, from newspaper and social media records to genetic analysis.
The FBI used the profile to put together a family tree. They matched Bradley with her brother, confirming the identity of the athletic, girly girl and giving her back her real name.
‘That really changed everything’
The mystery of “Chelsea Jane Doe” couldn’t have been solved until recently, thanks to advancements in technology and the growing number of people who are uploading DNA into public databases.
For centuries, genealogists have used paper records to build family trees. A couple decades ago, genealogists began using DNA analysis to knock down “genealogical brick walls,” where paper trails stop, said CeCe Moore, co-founder of DNA Justice, a nonprofit organization that allows anyone to upload their genetic profile to their DNA database,serving as resource for law enforcement genetic genealogists.
The identification of the Golden State Killer in 2018 was the first time a major public case had been solved through genetic genealogy, according to Moore.
“That really changed everything,” Moore said.